Database

Aim

The aim of this website is to provide open access BCI data sets to the general public. We believe that such a collection of different data sets will increase scientific transparency and efficiency, promote the validation of published methods, and foster the development of new algorithms. In addition, publishing research data is becoming more important as public funding agencies are moving towards open research data requirements. For example, the European Commission has recently launched a pilot to open up publicly funded research data. All projects participating in this pilot are required to maintain a data management plan, which describes the specific measures to make data generated in the project publicly available.

Download

Requirements

Anonymization

Publishing data collected from and about people (which includes BCI data) requires a few extra precautions that need to be taken into account. For starters, the privacy of all participants must be protected. This means that it must be impossible to trace the data back to an individual person (or sometimes even to a group of individuals). Therefore, such personal information must be anonymized before the corresponding data can be publicly released.

Dates except year (people above age 89 must be aggregated into a category of age 90 or older)

Telephone numbers

Fax numbers

E-mail addresses

Social security numbers

Medical record numbers

Health plan beneficiaries numbers

Account numbers

Certificate/license numbers

Vehicle identifiers and serial numbers (e.g. license plate numbers)

Device identifiers and serial numbers

URLs

IP address numbers

Biometric identifiers (e.g. finger prints)

Full face photographic and comparable images

Any other unique identifying number, characteristic or code

Informed consent

It is important to obtain informed consent from each participant before publishing the (anonymized) data. Although both verbal and written consent are both equally valid, we strongly recommend the written alternative. The UK Data Archive provides a sample consent form, which is usually distributed together with a study information sheet.

Ethics committee approval

Research standards often require studies to be approved by ethics committees. These bodies are referred to as Research Ethics Committee (REC), Independent Ethics Committee (IEC), Ethical Review Board (ERB) or Institutional Review Board (IRB). Regulations differ from country to country, and approval by an ethics committee might not always be required by law. However, we recommend to obtain ethics clearance for all BCI studies involving collection of new data. If possible, a large and official ethics committee should be preferred over small internal committees, for example committees registered with the Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) at the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS).